I used to spend my lunch breaks with Gus. While the Irish boys went to buy hot food at one of the stalls that had set up across the road, we would make a seat out of bricks on the plank boards and take out our packs of pork and cheese sandwiches, prepared for us by our landladies. That was how I learned something extraordinary about Gus, an anecdote worth sharing because it provides a reminder of how redemption may come from confronting one’s deepest fears. The revelation came about more by chance than by any burning desire of his to share it with me. He was reserved by nature and although he would speak with enthusiasm about the art of building, teaching me useful rules I have long since forgotten, he did not talk easily about himself.
On the second or third day, as we ate our sandwiches in a companionable silence over the lunch break, a heated argument got under way. The windows of a top-floor room, right above our heads, had been flung open and a gentleman sat on the sill, legs swinging. He was threatening to throw himself to the ground. This incident, I am pleased to report, would end happily enough when the gentleman was persuaded to return inside. But a curious exchange then took place between Gus and myself. I said that I could not imagine a worse way to end one’s life than by falling from a great height, with all that time before hitting the ground. To which Gus replied, “It is not that bad as you think.” I asked him to explain what he meant, but at that moment the whistle blew and we had to go back to work.
The next day, as we ate our lunch, I asked him again. It turned out that when Gus arrived in America, he had settled with his mother, father and sister on a prairie lot near the town of St. Clair, in Michigan.5 The lot belonged to his uncle, the Mr. Swanson of Swanson & Co. For a few months one winter, he worked in a logging team, something he said he vowed he would never do again, even before he had the accident that is the subject of this anecdote.
One day, he was given the job of breaking a logjam and, though he managed to do so successfully, he failed to make it back to the riverbank. Instead, he was driven over the nearby Falls. (He is telling me this, I should add, in the most matter-of-fact way.) He knew there was no chance of survival. But, he said—and this was the reason for his comment about the gentleman falling from the window—he did not feel afraid.
These are the notes I made that evening in my journal, in which I tried to capture—no doubt inexpertly—something of his halting English.
I am having much time for think before I go over. I don’t explain this. Only that time, it is slow. I am not thinking and nothing to worry. I see beautiful pictures to my life from when I am born to when I am die. The pictures are having no order or number one two three. They are like a stim. Now I am learning you Swedish. Maybe this is a new work for me! The Swedish say one stim is many fish together. This is how the pictures are. One big picture to my life from many small pictures together. Not too much fast, not too much slow.
I am so interesting in the pictures. Even some are happy and some are sad it is no different. I am seeing Lake Holjeån and Liverpool and flying fish and St. Clair house and my mother and father and Ingrid, she is my sister, and each mile to America from outside the train window. And I am interesting most in the pictures to my grandfather’s house. This is the house when I am born. Not like to houses in America built from nails and two-by-fours that fall down in five years, ten years. My grandfather’s house stay for three hundred years. I am the small boy to the pictures my face pressed to the walls. The timber is smooth. Deep gold color. Even in the joins they are having no holes or gaps. It is beautiful like a palace and strong like a rock. When I am seeing these pictures I decide if I am born a second life, I want to build houses like this to last for three hundred years. Then I can leave behind something special to the world.
In one picture I go to the roof of the house. It is made in shingles of birch bark. There has sedum on the sod. The sun is shining bright. I am the small boy to the roof and I fall asleep. When I wake up I am sliding over the edge. I drop like a stone. And for the first time in my life when falling from a height, there is no afraid in my heart.
* * *
How did he survive? That was a miracle nobody could explain. By sheer luck, he said, he must have landed not just in the deepest part of the pool, but in the only fraction of it that was momentarily free of churning logs. For the next three days he was sheltered and cared for by the farmer who had fished him out of the water five miles downriver, still clinging to a log, barely conscious. It had always been his greatest fear, he explained, to fall from a height. The accident at the St. Clair Falls was a blessing because it cured him of that fear forever. He now knew that if he were ever again to fall from on high, it would be neither a painful nor an unpleasant way to die.
The whistle blew, and the lunch break was over. I reflected on what he had told me, and how much stronger we all might be if, like him, we were forced to confront our greatest fears. Sadly, I never had a chance to ask Gus any more about the experience because the next day’s lunch break would be interrupted in a very different way, one I also noted down in my journal, but which I have decided not to put into this book. The incident has no direct bearing on the history of Chicago, although its inclusion in these pages would cast one of our participants in an even more unfavorable light.
On that sensitive matter, I proposition to beat about the bush no longer. No doubt there will be readers, in any case, who have already put two and two together. The young Oscar with whom I worked for those five days, raising the Tremont, would become Alderman Oscar “Burner” Brody. I will have plenty to say about him later. But on this occasion I will spare the rod. In any case, I have probably made enough derogatory comments already for the alderman to sue me—or worse. Suffice to say that Oscar Brody did not come off well in a confrontation he engineered the next day with Gus Swanson, our Swedish foreman.
* * *
The Tremont House Hotel was one of the earlier brick buildings to be raised in Chicago, thanks to the initiative of Mr. Ellis S. Chesbrough. While the Civil War divided the nation, caused immense suffering, and claimed the lives of over six hundred thousand young men, fomenting deep splits within families such as that of John S. Wright, the city of Chicago prospered. It remained literally “on the up” during the war, through to and beyond the Great Fire of 1871. Sadly, though, the Tremont House Hotel that I helped to raise, in my own small way, would be one of the thousands of buildings that failed to survive the greatest conflagration in the city’s history.
1861
THE MASONER
This chapbook was believed to have been in private circulation in Chicago during the 1890s. Who transcribed the monologue, and when, remains unknown. The trustees of the Chicago Historical Society have declared it to be an artifact of cultural importance. It should be noted, by way of introduction, that more Irish immigrated to the United States during the 1840s, when the potato famine was at its height, than any other nationality.
YERRA, MY FRIEND, you want to hear about Oscar when he claimed to be learning masonry? I shall do my best, though it is a tale that brings me no joy to tell. And I shall drink only a little more of your nectar for it hits the throat as fierce as the westerlies blow off Inishtooshkert on the spring tides, and the story I must relate has need of a careful tongue.
We lived on Archer’s Avenue at number 361, a house we shared with the cook, his wife and the boy Dermot, that was Oscar’s friend from the Canal. Our ward boss was “King Mike” McDonald, a rascal worse than Mr. Krumpacker for the swaggering on him and the hurt he meted out to those who least could take it. In the Gaelic tongue, he was a bradacha. When I heard Oscar had been working for King Mike, the news cut me to the marrow.
I talked to the boy. I reminded him of sacrifices made for his schooling and I urged him, by the saints, to use what he had learned from Father O’Connor to make a better life for himself. So I was happy when, one day, he told me he was training to be a masoner. Masonry is a noble trade. If there had been a great city like Chicago on Great Blasket, instead of little Dunquin and D
ingle across the way, Old Conn would have had something to say about it. For it is masoners, is it not, that make a city? Wisha, that it had been true, what Oscar told me.
On the fourth day of work, it was past the midnight hour and Oscar and Dermot were still not home. When I heard their drunken crowing in the street, I rose from my bed and waited. The gate was kicked open, followed by a search for keys. In they swayed, Dermot in the rear looking sheepish. I unleashed my tongue. I knew he had been consorting again with that villain King Mike. I told him plain and simple, he should be ashamed of himself. A man’s nature arrives when he’s a cub, and hadn’t I done my best to drive the Devil from him? I parleyed too long, and said more than a father should ever say to a son, whatever the cause. Ah, how painful it is to speak of what lays heavy on the heart.
Oscar pushed me hard against the wall, one hand like a vise on my throat. He would not end up like me, he said. He would be a big man in Chicago one day, not a penny-hoarding fisherman who pushed out a canoe each morning, praying that the fish would bite. He squeezed me like one possessed. I was beginning to wonder if the Great Master had decided my time down here was done when, letting go, he collapsed onto a chair, his head in his hands.
“By God and Mary, Oscar,” I gasped, “you’ll say you’re sorry.”
He raised his head. “A real man,” he said, “would fight back.”
“With his own son?” I told him some truths. He thought life was easy, did he? He thought he could make the world bend whichever way he wanted? One day, he would learn that nothing is easy, and that anything too easy cannot be honest. He should listen to what Old Conn said about that. But he was not listening to anything. He was snoring in his chair, and nothing would rouse him. That was why I spoke about Mochta in the way I did. I wanted his attention.
“What?” he groaned. “What’re you sayin’ about Uncle Mochta?”
“Ah,” said I. “I thought that might be awakin’ thee.”
I should have stopped there, and said no more. But at times like this the tongue runs swifter than the brain. I told him about his Uncle Mochta, and the fortune that awaited him.
“What money? How much?”
“Begorra,” I snapped. “Don’t think you’ll know how much, nor that you’ll be getting your hands on it, not until you stop behaving like a lout and turn into a man. There is something broken in you, Oscar, and ye need to be afixing it.”
That silenced him. His eyes began to fill with tears. After a while, his aggression passed and the apologies began.
This is the problem. I love Oscar, whatever the badness he does, and he knows it.
He pushed himself onto his feet, searched for balance like a drowning man, and lunged across the room toward me. He arrived on his knees, his face a picture of penitence. “I’m sorry, Father,” he said. “I’m shamed, the same you’re sayin’. I promise I’ll change my ways.”
After more apologies and more pleading, I yielded. Uncle Mochta had left him $4,500, I told him. It was locked up in a bank, and would be released on his twenty-first birthday.
* * *
It was Dermot, after I pressed him, who told me what happened the next day, though I don’t know why I am sharing this shame with you, my friend, to put on that page of yours. My son woke late. Then there was a problem with the train from Bridgeport so he jumped out at the corner of State and Twelfth Street, and because the omnibuses were full, he decided to walk. It was another cold, gray February day. I know what Oscar is like. His head would have been spinning with those four thousand five hundred dollars. He’d have seen himself seated at a mahogany desk in a big office with soft leather armchairs, his black overcoat on the coat stand, a bowler on the hook. He’d have seen himself walking the aisles of the Potter Palmer dry-goods store on Lake, ordering merchandise with the flick of a finger as liveried staff scraped and bowed and called him “sir.” Once he inherited the fortune from Uncle Mochta, he’d start a business, a huge business. Yerra, that would have been the kind of nonsense that filled his head.
According to Dermot, when Oscar turned the corner onto Wells, he climbed some steps toward a line of shops built at the new street level, full of fancy signs and gaslit windows. He must have known he needed to brisk up, but something caught his eye in the window of a gentlemen’s haberdashery. A long-sleeved white shirt was on display next to a pair of dark pants like the ones used by the Union baseball team. He’d always dreamed of playing for the Union team. He would have stood there before that window and imagined dressing up in the colors, with a pair of spiked shoes and cap to match. After all, why not have an office with a big mahogany desk and play baseball for the Union team?
A wind was beating off the Lake as he set off again. It was a bitter morning, colder than a Presbyterian charity, he later cracked to Dermot. I grin, despite myself. He always had a likely tongue on him, the rascal. When he turned the corner at Dearborn and Lake, he ran into the crowds come to watch the raising of the Tremont. He bludgeoned his way through, probably still lost in his baseball daydream, yelling: “Clear the way for a home run.” I reckon that boy—the son I raised and love—instead of being worried about arriving late, was more interested in pretending to be the hero in the final between Union and Excelsiors, the last man in, making the home run that would clinch it and oh how he gripped the bat tight, and with the ball hurtling toward him how wide he swung to strike—the same as we’d do on the White Strand against the Dunquin folk in Christmas week—and there was a thwack of leather on wood as the ball soared into the outfield, and he cleared first base, second base, third base … the crowds were roaring “Oscar! Oscar! Oscar!” and in his daydream he heard Uncle Mochta’s voice—“Fly like a bird, Oscar!”—and the bat in his hand wasn’t straight but curved like a hurley and the outfield was open prairie and he was astride his Uncle Mochta’s shoulders as the crowds chanted his name.
See, how I’ve got carried away myself, in the imagining of it. I don’t know if that’s what he was really thinking. But I do know he arrived late, and was shouting “home run, home run.”
During the lunch break, their foreman (Dermot insisted on calling him “the Scandi”) sat eating sandwiches with another laborer, a young American they didn’t like: not because there was anything wrong with him, as Dermot admitted, but because he worked too hard. Those two sandwich-eaters were sensible, to my way of thinking, not throwing their pennies overboard on stale pies and weak grog from a stall. Oscar and Dermot had one of their wagers—when the whistle blew, whoever reached the stall second had to pay. Oscar won (he probably always did), but he treated Dermot in any case. He couldn’t wait to talk about his fortune-in-waiting.
This is where my tale saddens me to the depths. To take a swipe at your own family can be pardoned. We all commit that unkindness, once or twice in our lives. But to swipe a stranger without provocation? Imagine this. Their pies and grog are finished, and they’re stamping their feet to keep warm, with their hands shoved beneath their oxters.
“So what shall you do,” asks Dermot, “when you git the ’heritance?”
At that moment, they’re distracted by a lady coming out of the hotel entrance. The bellboy holds the door open for her. She is tight in furs and scarves and her hat is pulled down low, but it’s clear that she’s a beauty. The whistle blows but Oscar does not move. “We shall stay at the Tremont House, Dermot, to celebrate,” he says. “And we’ll find for ourselves two young cherries, just like that one.”
Dermot blushed when he told me this, and no wonder.
“Brody?” It is the foreman, calling them.
Oscar leads the way across the road back to the site, but he’s in no hurry. The opposite, in fact. The foreman is waiting for them, hands on hips.
“You know why I didn’t fire you before?” says the foreman. “Because an Irish was helping me one time. I was to pass on the favor, by helping an Irish in trouble.”
Without saying a word, Oscar punches him.
The Scandi doubles up and groans.
How it hurts me to talk like this, but now that I have started, I must go to the end. Oscar spits on his knuckles and slaps Dermot on the back. “I’ve been wanting to do that for a long time.” Then he kicks over a pile of bricks, and says it feels grand to do that too.
Everyone has stopped work to watch. A whistle is blowing somewhere. Foremen are shouting. But nobody’s moving. Nor does Oscar seem to have noticed that nobody’s cheering.
“If you want a fight,” says someone, “fight on equal terms.”
“Fair fight,” shouts someone else.
The Scandi is struggling back to his feet.
Everyone takes up the cry. “Fair fight, fair fight.”
Dermot has started to retreat into the crowd. There’s nothing he could have done, he claims.
The Scandi is showing his fists.
* * *
I heard all this later, after I’d tended Oscar’s wound above the eye with a dose of carbolic. He was in a poor way. Over and over, he repeated a story about how he fell from the first floor when the wall collapsed beneath him, and of how he’d always worried the Tremont foundations looked unstable but nobody ever listened.
Later, when Dermot told me all he could remember, however much I wanted to believe otherwise, I knew in my heart it was the truth. I was left to wondering if Oscar managed to land a single blow on the foreman before that gentleman knocked him out cold. My boy fell sideways, and cut his head on one of those bricks he’d kicked over.
Dermot took him to a quack on LaSalle Street who pulled and tugged at his forehead as though he were a baker kneading dough before putting in stitches that felt, reported Oscar, “tight as knots and thick as cord.” He vowed that one day he would get his own back on the “Scandi.”
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